Mileage reimbursement for employers

What an accountable plan gives you

Under an accountable plan, mileage you reimburse to an employee is not wages. It is not taxable to the employee and not subject to payroll tax for the company. For 2026 you can reimburse at the IRS standard mileage rate of 72.5 cents a mile without either side owing tax on it.

The plan is not automatic. To qualify, the IRS requires three things: a business connection for the expense, substantiation of each trip within a reasonable time, and return of any excess reimbursed beyond what was documented. Miss any of the three and the payments can fall into a non-accountable plan, where the whole amount becomes taxable wages.

The current rate, with its source, is on the 2026 IRS mileage rate page.

Substantiation means a record per trip

Substantiation is where reimbursement plans fail an examination. A round-number allowance with no log behind it is exactly what turns a tax-free plan into taxable wages. For each trip, the record should show:

• the date;
• the miles driven;
• the destination;
• the business purpose of the trip.

And the commute stays out. Home to a regular office is never a reimbursable business mile, however far — reimburse it tax-free and it is simply disguised pay.

How your team supplies it

Kilevo builds the record from each employee's calendar. From Google Calendar, Outlook or an ICS feed, it turns every appointment that has an address into a trip, with the title as the purpose and the distance from Google Maps. What your people already schedule becomes their log. That is also the limit: without a calendar, there is nothing to read. There is no GPS and no phone app.

The sync runs nightly at 3:30 a.m. for subscribers; anyone can also start it on demand. Never real time — once a night, or on request. Each employee chooses which calendars count, keeps private events out, and excludes a non-business appointment with one click. Everyone exports their own annual report as a PDF, by country, with trips and receipts together.

Manager controls live only in the Team plans

This is where tools stay vague, so let us be exact. The manager role — with trip validation, monthly period closure, and a ZIP export that bundles a summary CSV plus one PDF per employee — exists only in the Team plans.

The Duo, Trio and Quad plans do not give you that. They let you invite standalone accounts that pay nothing, under a single invoice. Useful for carrying the cost, but there is no manager, no validation, and no period closure. Do not promise your team an approval flow on a plan that has none. Validation periods are monthly only, not weekly.

What the Team plans actually add — validation, period closure, the ZIP export — is on the team management page.

The plans and what each includes are on the pricing page.

What Kilevo reads from the calendars

The connections are read-only: Kilevo cannot change a calendar. Meeting attendees are never fetched or stored, and an event's description is read but never written to the database. Payments run through Stripe; no card data is kept. What is read and kept is detailed on the security and privacy page.

This page is general information, not tax advice: confirm your plan with a tax professional or the IRS guidance. Want to try it with your team? Open a free account.